Sunday, March 28, 2010

Release date: March 25, 2010
85-002X Juristat Spring 2010 Vol 30, no. 1
Using the most recent annual data from the Survey of Maintenance Enforcement Programs, this article looks at families who are receiving child support and are enrolled in a maintenance enforcement program. The characteristics of families living in lower and higher income neighbourhoods in the reporting census metropolitan areas are compared.

Here are Edmonton and Calgary - the report has many others. (Shows you where to move to reduce/eliminate your payments? kidding >:)

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Again, Ms. Kay brings attention to the hypocrisy of the MSM (this time in the US) with an artists exploitation of a double-standard in making fun of male suicide. If women were prominently portrayed Ms. Kay believes the outcry would be loud and clear as showing "entrenched hatred against women". The cruel irony is that men ARE facing a crisis in suicides.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

I found this rather interesting. It provides a libertarian viewpoint of the state's incursion into our lives.

The Bigger the Government, the Less You Are Needed
Dennis Prager | Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Among the things left and right, religious and secular, agree on is that one of the few real needs human beings have is to be needed.When we are not needed, life feels pointless.The need to be needed is universal.

Men need it; women need it. The sexes may feel needed in different ways, but the depth of the need is the same. Many women feel particularly alive when needed by their young children; many men feel worthy when needed by their family and/or their work. That is why most women navigate difficult emotional straits when their adult children leave home and assume independent lives, and why most men find it so crushing to lose their job -- not necessarily because of loss of income, but because of the loss of meaning that comes from no longer being needed.

Only when we are needed do we believe we have significance. Give a boy a special task -- just about any task -- and he blossoms. Give a girl a person -- in fact, almost any living being -- who depends on her, and she blossoms.Of course, there are also myriad unhealthy ways of feeling needed. If an unwed teenage girl has a baby in order to feel needed, it is usually a bad thing for her, for the child and for society. If a boy joins a gang to feel needed/significant, it is bad for him and society.

Though not consciously intending to, over time, the left destroys people's ability to be needed and, therefore, to be or feel significant. As I regularly note, the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. One can add: The bigger the government, the less significant the citizen -- especially men. This is easy to explain because it is definitional. The more the state does, the less its citizens are needed to do.

One well-known example is the way welfare robbed so many men of significance when women and their children came to depend financially on the state. And it goes further than that. In order to feel significant, men not only need to have others depend on them, they also need to depend on themselves, on their own work and initiative. But that, too, is destroyed as the state gets bigger. Fewer and fewer people work for themselves (which leads to, among other things, the disappearance of that quintessentially American ideal of the risk-taking entrepreneur).

It gets worse. As being needed and significant shifts from the individual to the state, the state increasingly determines who is needed and who has significance. That means, first of all, politicians. Obviously, whoever controls the ever-expanding government has the most significance in a society. Another significant group in the leftist state are media people.

They are significant in a non-leftist state such as America, as well. But there is a huge difference. Since American media are largely independent of government, there are a far greater number of significant media people in America than in the much smaller world of consolidated state media in Europe or Latin America. There is nothing like the BBC or French Radio and Television in the United States. Therefore, no one in American media is nearly as powerful as are the heads of the BBC or RTF. So the American state cannot anoint who is significant in media.

Another significant group in the leftist state is intellectuals. They, too, are largely determined by the state, which funds nearly all education and intellectual life. One reason intellectuals in America and Europe are so often estranged from American culture is that intellectuals have rarely had the fame or significance here that they have had in Europe. There are no American intellectuals who have had the celebrity or influence that Jean-Paul Sartre did in France, for example.

So, too, artists take on greater prominence as the leftwing state grows. And they, too, are funded and celebrated by the state.In the ever-expanding state that the left creates, the vast majority of individuals lose significance in that they are simply less needed as the state takes over many of their roles.

Fifty years ago, the men of the local Rotary Club had prestige and societal significance. So did fathers. So did clergy. With the ascendance of the left and the expansion of their state, much of their power and societal significance has eroded.

Now, as the state expands further into health care, the same will happen to doctors as power and prestige are transferred from them to the heads of dozens of new government health regulatory agencies. Over time, neither you nor your doctor will fully decide your treatment.

Indeed, over time, if the left has its way and the state keeps expanding, you will also not decide what temperature to keep your house or how to get to work. Nor will you be needed to educate your children (that is already the job of the state, and much of Europe now bans home schooling), or to raise and discipline your children (the state will ensure you are doing it correctly, and spanking is now illegal in 25 countries). Fathers will be needed primarily (and after divorce, only) as providers of child and spousal support.

In short, you will be needed essentially for one thing: to finance the one thing that is truly needed -- the state.

Monday, March 15, 2010

I found this new item interesting as the "senior manager" was male. However the company denies any such statement and it Ms. Bovrisse's suit was dismissed as "sour grapes". She apparently intends on gathering more witnesses and re-applying.

A senior manager at Prada has claimed that she was ordered to get rid of "old, fat and ugly" staff in its Japanese stores.

Rina Bovrisse, who oversaw 500 staff in 40 stores across Japan, also alleges that the chief executive wanted her to change her hairstyle and lose weight. She was placed on involuntary leave last November.

She has started a discrimination and harassment case in Tokyo's industrial tribunal courts.

Her allegations focus on an incident in May last year when she claims that Davide Sesia, the chief executive of Prada Japan, allegedly asked her to "eliminate" around 15 managerial staff he described as "old, fat, ugly, disgusting or not having the Prada look."

Afterwards, 13 members of staff were issued with demotional transfer orders due to poor sales, Ms Bovrisse told the Japan Times.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Among one of the most useful ideas was this Pre-Marriage Due Dilligence Checklist workbook that is almost humorous in it's un-PC attitude of advocating "Full Disclosure" by blind couples in their race to altar. It is done from the point of view of men who are often pursued by "gold diggers".

Countess Alexandra Tolstoy: Q: Where does this leave traditional male attributes/qualities - reticence, stoicism, aggression, gallantry? A: I can't believe they remove male instincts completely from a man for the family, society or for men. We should not meddle with nature. Women are too greedy - they want it all which is unfair. [Editor: I find it mildly amusing that Ms. Tolstoy has now divorced (2009) this "masculine" man she married in 2003, despite having his child. And yes she is a distant relative to famous Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy.]

She claims "If women really understood how men felt - they would act differently."

Melanie Phillips - Feminisation of society is not disadvantageous - it amount to social suicide. Men do not know where they stand and women are at fault because they do not give men a place to stand.

Friday, March 05, 2010

Surprisingly there have been a number of articles in the last week drawing attention to the heroic actions of men in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 versus the lack of similar chivalry when sister White Star vessel, Lusitania sank in 1915. Of particular interest is the light they shine on the misandric tendency's of Suffragettes (early Feminists) in belittling or denying or the actions of men - in the Titanic's case belittling their heroic sacrifices and unfairly (the men were dead!) questioning their motivations and in the Lusitania's case denying they acted "chivalrously". I mean how can you win with such a crowd? That such modern Feminist tactics actually existed at that time is what is incredible to me.

The Titanic sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg. Of the 2,200 people on board, 1,517 died (69%). The Lusitania sank in 1915, victim to a German U-boat torpedo. Of the nearly 2,000 people on board, 1,200 died (55%). In addition to carrying about the same numbers of passengers, the demographic composition of the two ships - adults, children, men, women, old, young - was also similar.

Two stark differences distinguish the tragedies. On the Titanic, most of the survivors were women and children: 75% of women and almost all the children were saved as against 20% of the men. While on the Lusitania, of the 639 who escaped it was likely only the fittest amongst both men and women aged 16-35 survived.

According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the altruism of the Titanic and the length of time it took for the ship to sink are causally linked. Benno Torgler, study author and economics professor at Queensland University of Technology in Australia explains that circumstances dictate levels of altruism. According to the study, since the Titanic passengers had a few hours to consider their options, "there was time for socially determined behavioural patterns to re-emerge."

As Ms. KAY suggests, the men who so willingly laid down their lives for women and children in the Titanic "had been brought up in the very heart of the same robust patriarchy that feminists today use as a shibboleth to frighten young girls with." Under current Feminist double-speak "They should all have been candidates for anger management, not a chivalry so breathtakingly selfless that they almost to a man went to watery graves in stoic humility so that total strangers might live - simply because of their sex."

For these men were the product of a particular culture, one that perceived chivalry and honour and duty as the highest values. And the highest expression of those highest values was the privileging of women and children's lives over their own. And they acted on that perception.

And then WWI erupted. Countless thousands of men - really, only the best or at least the others who had not given their own lives on the Titanic - marched into the machine guns out of a sense of honour, chivalry and sacrifice (no matter how utterly senseless or misplaced). Again Ms. KAY:

The study reminds us that the heroism of the Titanic was a willed phenomenon, and one that feminists do not wish to discuss (I have tried).

Instead of fetishizing the victimhood of women at men's hands and the deviance from our cultural norm that Marc Lepine represented with man-bashing dirges across the land every December 6, would it not make more sense - and would it not be more ethically fitting and socially unifying - to celebrate the more representative manliness of men every April 15, the date of the Titanic's sinking?

ONF suggests the "true" gap is 12.8% - but insists this does not imply gender discrimination. The higher figure is sanctioned by HARMANS' "Equality" Directorate, but includes both FT and PT earnings.

A "Pay Gap" does not appear until women reach 30 (which supports the view that it is the onset of having children for most women that create much of the difference). From 18-29 there is hardly any difference at all.

Confusion exits when PT and FT are mixed. When men and women who work 20-30 hours per week are compared - women actually earn slightly more than men.

I have just read Mark Rosenthal's response (he is a researcher at non-profit www.mediaRADAR.org) to a "smear" in an OpEd piece by Carolyn GREGOIRE entitled "The Fight for Men's Rights".

Apart from the misrepresentations presented it is remarkable that GREGOIRE did not attempt to interview Rosenthal. Presumably as a student journalist this must be the 1st Commandment. Admittedly her article fell under the safe gambit of OpEd, but even then, why stray so far from the subject material without a fact check or allow a response in the form of a comeback piece? These are traditional journalistic courtesy's.

Among the remarks made by Rosenthal is that he was the victim of a violent mother who physically abused his father. Further he feels lucky this happened before the current "Zero-Tolerence" became a zero-intelligence “arrest-the-man-regardless-of-the-facts” policy, or the state would have removed his father - the only parent who protected him - and likely accelerated his demise similar to the suicide of his sister.

Monday, March 01, 2010

Melanie PHILLIPS suggests that given new social research by UK sociologist Geoff Dench that shows that not only is one in four mothers single, but more than half of such mothers have never lived with a man at all and are choosing to live alone on state benefits. Here is a summary of her key points:

This is that the most important force behind elective lone parenthood is not ' feckless' men, but the attitude of women and girls.

In the past ... men committed themselves to the mothers of their children on the basis that they could trust they were indeed the father because the woman was sexually faithful. Today, this bargain has been all but destroyed.

This has given rise to an increasing number of women-only households where fathers have been written out of the family script for three or four generations or more. The consequences of such family disintegration - as is now indisputable - are in general catastrophic for both individuals and for society.

This problem will not be cracked, however, unless women come to believe once again that their interests lie in attracting one man to father their children and then stick with them.

In a meeting last week of the Centre for Policy Studies to discuss Dench's research, it was suggested that the state should pay a dowry to couples who undertook to stay together, and that this dowry should be paid to the girl in such a relationship.

It seemed to me, though, that girls already have a kind of dowry in the form of Child Benefit, paid to mothers on the birth of every child - a dowry with a destructive effect. For the great unsayable is that Child Benefit acts as a huge incentive to have children outside marriage.

But the greatest need children have is for their two parents to bring them up.

And what few anticipated was that, along with the impact of all the other social and economic changes, some women used Child Benefit to help junk men altogether as superfluous to requirements.

Marriage has always helped turn young men into responsible adults.

What's needed, therefore, is to help turn men once again into an attractive, marriageable proposition.

The most important thing they need is, of course, a job - which is why the policy of pushing lone mothers out to work is actually disastrous, particularly in areas of high unemployment.

But welfare must stop reinforcing the idea that men are dispensable. The best way of underpinning marriage is probably through transferable tax allowances for married couples.

The undoubted expense of such measures would be more than offset by reducing the astronomical cost to this country of family breakdown.

The irony is that, as a result of modern notions of gender equality, it is men who now need special help to restore the sexual bargain that will not just benefit the male sex but stop the degradation of women and family life that so threatens us all.

In Canada and America, this economic transfer has occurred without massive state intervention so common in England and other "so-called" Liberal Social Democracy's merely by imposing most of that burden directly onto fathers - along with not bothering to concern themselves about how men survive their ever increased financial burden. Meanwhile we have the Gold-Diggers Sweepstakes. Whoever can trap a man into sex can shortly afterwards decide to have a child and go after whatever wealth he has accumulated by being sexually cautious.